Is this how children learn to read these days?

[Bananaketchup]

Am genuinely asking. DD is in reception. She started late at the school and has only been in full-time since xmas, so they don't really know her too well. She loves being read to, she can sound out words when she's in the mood, but is also one for the easy life. She reads once a week 1-1 with a TA at school, and brings the book home afterwards until it's swapped a week later. The books are of the 'this is a house, this is a garden' level. In her reading record it will say 'DD read the book and enjoyed it'. But when she reads it at home she rattles off the sentence on each page and has clearly just memorised it, and isn't actually reading. If I mix the page order up, she can't read it. If I hide the picture, she can't read it. She will make wild guesses without even trying to sound out the word e.g. she will guess 'the' for 'house', just pure guesses. This weekend she got in a strop because I wouldn't let her see the picture (as she was just guessing from this and not reading the words at all). She then said 'but Mrs X (The TA she reads with) says look at the picture, then read it'. So my question is (if you've got this far without dying of boredom), is this how children are taught to read - to look at the picture to know what the words say? Because DD isn't paying any attention to the words, just gabbling off what's in the picture, and I can't really see how this is teaching her to read. I am minded to speak to school, but don't want to be 'that' mum if this is genuinely a method children learn to read by, which I'm unaware of. Can anyone advise please?

michaelrosenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/phonics-summary-of-my-views.html

Maizie, tbh I think column's children are in the 'lucky' 80% who will learn to read despite, rather than because of, the method used to teach them. The 'internalising' of the phonic code they are doing will never be visible to column, or necessarily articulated by the children, and thus she will believe that her method not only workks, but is superior to any used by those teaching a statistically significant number of children to read.

Equally, my DS was one of the lucky 80%. He taught himself to read, through memorising whole books, and it was only as a careful observer, already interested in the teaching of reading (and enlightened by a very knowledgeable reception teacher who was very interested in him) that I spotted that he in fact had an excellent self-taught knowledge of the phonic code, which he had worked out for himself.

In a sense, it doesn't matter what we use for the 80%, and so it doesn't matter what column uses for her own children as long as she doesn't interfere with the better, more research based and knowledgeable teaching of everyone else. They will learn to read whatever we do. It is the successful teaching of the 20% that matters, and reducing that 20% to the minimum % possible - and that is where synthetic phionics, well, exclusively and exhaustively taught (not one sound per letter or digraph and then abandoned) comes into its own.

Interesting, column - so your elder daughter has now articulated that she has managed to work out the phonic code despite whole-word teaching and is now preferring to use that better toolkit when reading new texts.....

Wouldn't it be more interesting to simply teach your younger daughter, very well indeed, using the phonics method, and 'cut out the middle bit', so to speak? Seer whether that in fact works better?

After all, the look and say method works (when it does work) because readers eventually work out the phonic code and can thus decode new words. Synthetic phonics merely makes that 'invisible' method explicit and thus accessible to more people. it is more successful simply because it is more direct - it teaches children directly what they need to know, not by 'showing them lots of stuiff and hoping that eventually they work it out for themselves'.

But 80% is not a bad puddle to aim for.

If I had good reason to believe that my daughters were in the unlucky 20% I'd have burned the flashcards and would be skimming back madly for every posting the phonicsy people had ever made.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25917646

All I am advocating is an approach which starts with the child and is not dictated by Ofsted or DFE. An open mind to all methods not an attack by the phonics police!

OJK, so if 95%+ of children will learn to read using phonics, and only 80% using mixed methods, surely 'starting with the child' starts with the most successful method first, does thast really well, identifies whether they are in the tiny minority that doesn't learn to read this well and then ibntervenes effectivekly? It is surely less than child centred to deliberately choose to teach a method that is less effective, in the hope that a child is NOT one of the 1 in 5 for whom it won't work?

But why aim for the 80% when the 95+% is available to you? That's what I really don't understand?

Agree tinytalker phonics is useful for many children but not for all. They need other methods too.

Maybe, but phonics does require multiple stages. You have first to learn the letters and then their sounds, whereas with L&S you only have to learn the whole word.

So, by the time phonicsy people have fiddled about with this and that, L&S people have children reading whole stories.

(OK, it's the same story every time) but at least it's a whole story.

Ruby - well-taught phonics works for 95+% of children. Mixed methods, however well taught, only teaches 80% of children to read. Why this insistence on adding the failing method to the one that works?

Why is it ibnteresting to read 1 story? Why devote so much time to achieving the backwater of 12 story? Wjhy not go 'straight for the jugular' and teach the method that will enable a child to access all stories? DD went from total non-reader to completely fluent decoder in a term - 3 months. OK, maybe if I'd done the flashcards thing she could have read her first story in a month - but a month per story is not the same as 3 months to access ANYTHING.

(And I'd go for 44 sounds = reads everything in preference to thousands of individual words to read anything worthwhile EVERY time)

I apprecate that you like the 'performance' aspect of it 'Oooh, my child read her first books at 2 or 3', and I appreciate that if that is your goal, look and say is a way of achieving that limited ambition. I'd go for making my child a proper reader, instead.

I think you can do both. I don't know what's going to happen with the younger daughter. But the older one learned (as you say) 12 stories and then decided that phonics (making your own words as you go along) was preferable. Good for her.

But at least she had the choice.

teacher I think it is in reaction to the phonics as a miracle cure that works for all.... Yes teach phonics as it gets great results, some children will learn to read regardless of how they are taught, but some won't. There needs to be options for the children who don't learn with phonics.

(By your measure, DS was 'reading' at 3, or a little earlier. He could recite many books, pointing word to word precisely, that he had already had read to him. He knew which word coprresponded to the word he was saying BUT he did not generalise that - he could not pick up an unknown vbook and read it until the months before he started school, by which time he had oworked out the phonc code. It depends, as ever, what you mean by rerading - for me it is the picking up of an unknown but appropriate text and being able to make sense out of it.)

Ruby, yes, but well-taught, those children are very rare, much rarer than you seem to think.

Mrz, if you are still out there, as know that you teach phonics very well and have done so to hundreds if not thousands of children: how many chikldren, well taught - and I include those who have significant learning difficultiesm, as I know you have your fair share of those - have not been abkle to learn to read well using phonics?

Sure, I agree; at the level of pre-reading, we can all disagree about what reading really means. (And we do.) If we listened to a teenager struggling with reading, doubtless our respective views of reading would have converged significantly.

But, on the whole, I don't think it matters much. I think for teachers the reading ethos and methodology matters far more than for individual parents because teachers are responsible for the performance of the cohort, whereas parents are only responsible for their own children.

So, I don't much care whether L&S or phonics does the trick. But I do care whether or not the trick gets done.

Look and say is like learning to read Chinese.

It never made any sense to me that that was the system adopted in the 1990s when my older children were learning to read. I taught them phonics instead, incurring the wrath of the teachers who for some bizarre reason seemed to think that if they didn't do look and say then they weren't reading.

Phonics seems to me to be the only sensible option in getting from 26 letters to being able to read tens of thousands of words. Look and say means you have to learn every word individually. It's nonsensical.

And I was reading fluently at just 3, fyi. My mother taught me using phonics and the alphabet and letter sounds I'd known since 18 mo.

I don't know how good your Chinese is, but my English tells me that lots of our words are closely related

bookworm book & worm
handbook hand & book
love
loves
lovers
lovely
L&S people can actually spell, you know (or maybe you don't know!)

Anyway, from what I understand of Chinese characters, the pictorial representations are symbolic. And therefore any similarities in meaning are nowhere near as likely to be conveyed to the next most similar word as they are in English.

Please feel free to disagree.

"Maybe, but phonics does require multiple stages. You have first to learn the letters and then their sounds," perhaps that's where you are going wrong columngollum ... i'm not sure what is being taught in your descroption but it certainly isn't how phonics is taught!

I think children learn best using lots of methods, phonics, memorisation, the pictures.

Yes they do memorise books and spot the patters ( John had a book, rod had a bug..etc)

I think different methods work best for different children and one of mine likes to memorise whole words. He can sound out, but only needs to read a word once or twice to remember it. That is a fast way to learn and he then uses his phonics for new words.

Horses for courses and schools should use many approaches IMHO.

But 20% fail to learn using the mixture of methods you describe - and there is no way if knowing which children will fall into that 20% until that child's self-esteem is well and truly rock bottom.

Why take that risk?

Whereas I've tried to avoid the "memorising the book". That's not learning to read as knowledge doesn't carry over to the next time you meet the word!